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The resurrected Hearn, rough innards and all, writes a compelling fairy-tale ending to the ongoing narrative of post-industrial decay.

Michel de Broin's colossal Mirror Ball sculpture, made for the festival in 2013, finds its perfect home inside the Hearn. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Luminato's underwhelming Trove means to subvert ideas of value while imagining a museum of the future inside the Hearn, but falls flat.
(Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

The turbine hall is a main thoroughfare at the Hearn, which the Luminato has boldly resurrected from its post-industrial death to be a cultural hub for the festival this year. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Weisbrodt in the Hearn's theatre space, bi-sected by an i-beam that serves as part of the building's old structure. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Luminato's Artistic Director Jorn Weisbrodt under the arches of the Hearn Power Plant's tubine hall, where the festival will make its home this year. Decommissioned in 1983, Luminato's adoption of the Hearn is a bold statement of possibility for the hulking indiustrial ruin. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Let’s start by saying what everyone knows: The Richard L. Hearn Power Generating station, a monolithic husk of an industrial relic marooned on the far point of a peninsula in Toronto’s Portlands, is awesome. That Luminato, the 10-year old culture festival, has set up shop here, housing virtually of its offerings within its artfully rusted and dishevelled innards, is better still: A reactivation, 30-plus years after it went dark, that now serves as the high bar of visionary city-building for a town that’s ever been historically short on blue-sky dreams.

That’s the good part, and on a recent walk-through, Jorn Weisbrodt, the festival’s artistic director, sparkled with the feel-good vibes coming off everyone trailing along behind him.

“What a gift this place is,” he said, leading the way through a long corridor of heavy concrete arches, the long-ago support structure for coal-powered turbines that once churned out millions of megawatts for the nearby city. “To me, this is Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and tomorrow, the princess is going to wake up.”

There’s little arguing that the resurrected Hearn, rough innards and all, writes a compelling fairy-tale ending to the ongoing narrative of post-industrial decay. In the best-case imagining, you’re hard-pressed to not imagine London’s Tate Modern, which rose from its death as a power station itself to become the world’s best-attended museum.

To be fair, the Hearn is a long ways off such a dramatic redux.

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“Right now, it’s more a statement about what’s possible,” says designer Alex Josephson, one of the principals of Partisans, the Toronto architectural firm that rehabilitated the old shell to the point where Luminato could move in. “Toronto is very functionally oriented. It’s not good at abstract, so we’re giving it a little push.”

There’s no shortage of questions about how and if the Hearn can continue to work, whether for the festival or anything else (in response to a persistent one about its isolated location, Weisbrodt, almost compulsively, reminds us unprompted that it’s “so close” and “seven minutes from Union Station.”)

The bigger question, though, is what to put inside it. Luminato’s answers are many, and some better than others.

The main theatre, cleaved in two by an angular, rusted I-beam and built largely from shipping crates, is the repurposed Hearn at its best: It’s strangely intimate, creating its own world as it allows the intervention of its spectacular host. That bisecting I-beam aside, one glance up reveals 40-plus feet of open air to the building’s ceiling, dangling cable and conduit snaking along steel structure and crumbling concrete all the way.

In other portions, the building is less hospitable. Along the turbine hall, small interventions by OCADU students are overwhelmed by the presence of their surroundings, all but swallowed whole. Upstairs, the festival’s marquee offering for its visual arts program, Trove, vanishes along the brick wall to which it is awkwardly pasted.

This is merciful more than anything else. A selection of 50 photographs, by artist Scott McFarland, of objects Weisbrodt deemed to be iconically Torontonian, Trove is meant to be funny (I think) in its off-kilter notions of value. But it’s so badly presented — images are rumpled by the texture of the brick, making them barely viewable; nothing unites them, beyond a confusingly flat white backdrop, an apparent attempt at “virtualizing” a museum within the Hearn — that any joke here is as flat as a lead balloon.

After upping its art-world cred in recent years with important works by Marina Abromovich, Matthew Barney and Geoffrey Farmer, this is deflating regression. A picture of Massacre of the Innocents, the iconic Dutch master painting by Peter Paul Rubens owned by the Art Gallery of Ontario, sits alongside shots of such things as a taxidermied Rhino (the ROM’s) Blue Jays championship rings (owned by Rush’s Geddy Lee) and the Toronto Zoo’s pandas (seriously).

For McFarland, an artist of some renown, this is beneath him. Undiscerningly ugly, Trove represents Luminato at its worst: Embracing a twee, simple-minded populism — Pandas! Rhinos! Blue Jays! — that trumps elegantly attainable goals like presence and beauty.

Speaking of those things, Michel de Broin’s enormous Mirror Ball, made for the 2012 edition of the festival, finds itself perfectly at home here, throwing fragments of light along the enormous empty volume of space where the turbines once sat. That it casts its fractured glow right next to Trove and all but renders it invisible is among the best of its many attributes. The building forgives much, but not all, and we need more.

Luminato’s heart has never been in visual art, though (its best offering this year, Pierre Huyge’s Untilled, a reclining nude figure fitted with a thriving beehive affixed on its head amid the scrub-brush outside, is on loan from the AGO), and at the core of the festival and the Hearn itself is its main stage, which sits dead-centre under the old plant’s coal funnels, five stories above.

There are no walls, and the intentional bleedover of performances, from the Toronto Symphony to Rufus Wainwright’s Judy Garland tribute, is Weisbrodt’s vision. “I wanted things to be a little messy, to overlap,” he says. “Life is like that.”

Mess begets unpredictability, and as most of us know, it can go both ways. But Weisbrodt’s messy vision should be praised, and loudly. It’s a spectacular risk, and one worth taking, whatever mixed bag it produces.

The Luminato Festival runs from June 10 to 26. For tickets and information see luminatofestival.com

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